“How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard?” asks the Book of Proverbs. It only takes “a little folding of the hands to sleep,” the verse goes on, and nemesis can sweep over an individual or a whole people “as an armed man."
Solomon’s warning rang in my ears the other day after a disturbing conversation at lunch with a young Denver lawyer who I thought was no fool politically. Seems I was wrong about him, which is too bad — but how many millions exactly like him are there?
No sooner had this friend, call him Jack, heard I was just back from an international conference where Muslim blasphemy laws are being pushed on the free societies of the West, than he began enthusing about a slick pro-Islamic TV series invading US screens. All just harmless entertainment, to hear Jack tell it.
The show, produced in Erdogan's Turkey, is called “Resurrection: Ertugrul.” Resurrection; rich, huh? Netflix, which now offers a hundred episodes from the first three seasons, bills it as a historical drama where Muslim Turks in the 13th century heroically resist crusading Christians bent on plunder and conquest. Season 4 starts in October.
Jack, I should make clear, is a capable, serious, and in most ways thoughtful guy. He’s a solid husband and dad, an aspiring Republican candidate in his county, a devoted patriot, an elder in his church. But when he gushed about having binged for hours on this thing, and I replied — smiling wanly, but not in jest — that regardless of dramatic appeal, I couldn’t endure ten minutes of such lies, he pretty much laughed it off.
Did he know the Crusades were simply counter-offensive to retake historically Christian lands lost to Muslims by the sword, I asked. Apparently not.
Did he realize the Muslim political-religious system portrayed so sympathetically in “Ertugrul” is deadly determined to this day that our country under its rule shall become a place where he couldn’t raise his children in freedom, or practice law, or run for office, or keep his church doors open, or pray to his God? Apparently not.
Jack didn’t try in so many words to soothe me by saying there are two sides to every story, but that’s what I took his easy shrug to mean. Chill out, man, he seemed to be signaling: that was the 12th century, this is now. We’re America, we’ll be fine.
Will we? Americans, where the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan to Islamize all of us is concerned, continue drinking deeply of a venomous complacency cocktail. It’s a lulling mixture of the people’s live-and-let-live instinct, the First Amendment’s conditioning of everyone to leave even an anti-freedom religion free, the leaders’ fear of being called bigots, and the establishment’s multicultural utopianism, laced with anti-Western animus.
If, God forbid, this mighty republic perishes, her tombstone will need but one word: "Islamophobia.” A phobia is an irrational fear, a mental disorder. Does that describe a valid horror of murderous jihad? No. Does it describe a valid abhorrence of brutal sharia law? No. Does it describe a verbatim quotation of the Koran’s mandate for those things? No again, of course not.
Yet that one dishonest word paralyzes like a nerve agent. Free speech is being chilled. Cities, and soon entire states, are being colonized. National security, homeland security, and local law enforcement are being defanged. Schools are recruited as propaganda platforms. Churches are cowed into silence or worse. The language itself is being hijacked; no box-cutters required. And still we slumber. "A little folding of the hands..."
Though I have not seen a single minute of “Resurrection: Ertugrul,” I needn't do so to know that its inverted narrative of good guys vs. bad is simply one more vessel for the corrosive acid of Western self-hatred and Islamic passive-aggressive powerlust that Muhammed’s legions are injecting into our civilization and our very souls through every pore.
One TV series obviously can’t doom us, nor can one clueless dupe like Jack. My concern is that Jack is all too representative of a vast swath of well-meaning, asleep-at-the-switch citizens and voters in this country who won’t wake up to realize the mortal danger of global supremacist Islam within our gates until it’s too late.
“So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth [on a refugee visa], and thy want as an armed man [with a suitcase nuke].” Forgive me, friend. I’m not trying to be sensational. I’m trying to be real. Join me, please. It’s the eleventh hour for this land we love.